Pitch Practice: 1 boardroom, 3 years, 1,000 pitches, and now a podcast!

June 22, 2016

Pitch Practice is a weekly meetup at Atlanta Tech Village founded by Kevin Sandlin. It will be 3 years old on June 27th. So on that very day he is launching a podcast to share all the pitches and great content that happens each week at the Village, and he needs your help. Here’s more from Kevin:

First, a brief history of Pitch Practice.

A little over 3 years ago, I was working on “deductmor”, a mobile app for self-employed individuals to capture all their receipts with their phone and insert those expenses into QB or whatever accounting package they used. I was considering raising some capital, but, having bootstrapped my first 4 startups, I had no idea how to raise money.

I was on a startup scholarship at Atlanta Tech Village and mentoring entrepreneurs at ATDC when I learned about “Pitch Gauntlet”, a monthly meetup led by the then 4 principles at Venture Lab at GT. I went 3 months in a row, and got clobbered with wisdom every time, but it wasn’t enough practice for me to refine my pitch. I asked them if they would consider doing the meetup more often. They politely declined, so I went to the folks at Atlanta Tech Village and asked if I could start a weekly meetup group to help me and other entrepreneurs practice our pitches. They said yes.

Now, three years later, Pitch Practice has experienced more than 1,000 startup pitches, and it’s time for a new chapter in the life of this meetup for entrepreneurs, born out of a desire to learn and also to pay it forward to other entrepreneurs who were about to go where I had just been.

Pitch Practice Podcast

On June 27, 2016, exactly 3 years after the announcement of “StartupBP”, the Pitch Practice Podcast will launch on Apple iTunes. Listeners will have 10 brand new episodes right out of the gate, with one pitch and several lessons per episode. All of these first pitches were recorded at the Pitch Practice Meetup over several months, and we will continue to record anyone who wants to be featured on the podcast, but you can also submit your own pitch directly via the website.

If you’ve ever attended Pitch Practice, you know how much fun it is, and how much we learn every time. You just never know who’s going to pitch and what it’s going to sound like. The meetup remains free, open to anyone, and is every Friday at 1pm right after Startup Chowdown at Atlanta Tech Village. The podcast will be a direct reflection of the meetup: fun, easy, and full of the lessons that we’ve learned and shared over the last 3 years.

And just like the Pitch Practice meetup has grown by word of mouth, mainly from the “mouth” of Atlanta Tech Village, we want to launch the podcast in very much the same way. That’s why we need your help. We need at least 200 people to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast to be ranked #1 in the “New & Noteworthy” category on iTunes.

Help Launch Something New

Here’s what we need you to do. On June 27th, subscribe to the Pitch Practice podcast, rate it, and give it a short review. Easy right? Subscribe, rate, review. If you are a podcast listener, then you already know that to subscribe, rate, and review a podcast takes less than 2 minutes, and you can do it from your iPhone or from iTunes on your Mac or PC. If that’s you, you’re ready! Just join the launch team by entering your email address here.

If you’re not already an avid podcast listener, we’ve got you covered. Click here for full and complete instructions on how to Subscribe, rate, review the Pitch Practice Podcast.

We freaking LOVE you! Our goal is to help thousands of new entrepreneurs get better at articulating what they do. Our goal is to pay forward all the knowledge we’ve gained, shared, and put into practice in the weekly Pitch Practice Meetup at the Village.

Karen Houghton

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